Cannes 2025: Day 7: Monday 19 May

Spike Lee Returns and Denzel Washington Nabs a Palme d’Or

Spike Lee is back with a brand-new joint. And his leading man got the top honours.

Highest 2 Lowest reunites Lee with his frequent collaborator Denzel Washington (the first time the pair have worked together since, incredibly, Inside Man back in 2006) for a remake/reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s immortal classic High and Low. Kurosawa’s film, like Lee’s, was based on Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom, part of his 87th Precinct series. The A24/Apple Original Films production, which hits theaters in August before premiering on the Apple TV+ streaming service the following month, brought out Lee (who missed a Knicks game to be there), Washington and more.

Lee was first at Cannes in 1989 with Do the Right Thing, which lost the Palme d’Or to Sex, Lies and Videotape (discuss). He won the Grand Prix for BlackKKlansman and headed the jury once as well.

By all accounts, Highest 2 Lowest is Lee at his most dazzling, outspoken and entertaining. The original film focused on a kidnapping gone wrong (we’re hesitant to provide specifics in case the new film follows similar contours), with Washington playing a mogul who has to make some very tough choices. The film received a six-minute-plus standing ovation and almost every review has warmly embraced the movie.

Our own review is slightly less enthusiastic, with our critic calling the film “a mixture of gleaming, professional filmmaking and curious choices. It’s a showcase for a classic powerhouse, Washington, and an upstart one, ASAP Rocky. Overhauling and updating Kurosawa’s film by turning the lead character from a shoe executive to a music mogul, it simultaneously drags the story into the social-media age and uses it to pay tribute to older urban dramas.”

And while Highest 2 Lowest played out of competition, its leading man was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or – something that came as a complete surprise to the actor. (It happened right before the Highest 2 Lowest screening, with Lee handing him the award.) “This is a total surprise for me, so I’m emotional. It’s a great opportunity to collaborate with my brother once again, brother from another mother, and to be here once again in Cannes,” Washington said. “We’re a very privileged group in this room that we get to make movies and wear tuxedos and nice clothes and dress up and get paid for it as well. We’re just blessed beyond measure. I’m blessed beyond measure. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you all.”

Washington, who recently generated Oscar buzz (but not an actual nomination) for his bravura performance in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II and who has won two Oscars in years past, certainly deserves the honorary Palme d’Or. And it sounds like his latest collaboration with his Malcolm X and Inside Man collaborator Lee might be one of their very best.

Alpha Continues Through a Medical Emergency

Julia Ducournau, the director of Raw and the Palme d’Or-winning Titane, returned to Cannes with Alpha. And the screening was an undeniable smash, with a 11.5-minute standing ovation (again, depending on whose stopwatch you chose to believe) and some absolute rave reviews, like our own, which called it Ducournau’s “most exciting, emotional, existential and eviscerating work yet.”

But however good (or bad) Alpha actually is, the real story out of the Cannes premiere was the fact that someone, about an hour into the movie, became ill and had to be removed from the theater in a stretcher. Honestly, you can’t make this up. Audience members in the balcony began waving their phones as flashlights and calling for a doctor. While they called for the movie to be paused, the filmmaker’s latest, which is said to be her most autobiographical, kept on rolling.

The incident appears to be unrelated to the contents of the film, which is said to be pretty extreme, although that would be a pretty good piece of marketing – the film so brutal that it made a Cannes audience member sick. Will you be pulled out of the movie in a stretcher when it opens later this year via Neon? Only time will tell.

Splitsville Scores a Strike

The creators of Cannes premiere Splitsville spoke to TheWrap’s own Steve Pond during TheWrap’s Cannes Conversations in partnership with Brand Innovators, with filmmakers Michael Angelo Covino (who directed, starred, and wrote the movie) and Kyle Marvin (who wrote and acted in the film) discussing the film’s uphill battle towards production and completion. Since Covino and Marvin made their last film, 2019’s The Climb, the pair had survived a global pandemic, the twin strikes and more.

They were determined to make the film, which stars Covino, Adria Arjona, Dakota Johnson, and Marvin, with a distributor instead of finishing it and then waiting around hoping to sell it to somebody.

Producer Emily Korteweg said that Covino and Marvin wisely set Splitsville up to appeal to a wide audience. “I think you did have an awareness of what the market might be looking for and what is, maybe not missing, but where there is an opportunity in the comedic landscape, which means elevated comedy for a global audience,” she said. “So clearly, it came from story first. But you had an awareness of where you wanted to take it.”

Watch the rest of the interview below for more.

More Reviews and Commentary

Eagles of the Republic, the third film in Tarik Saleh’s Cairo trilogy, began with The Nile Hilton Incidentin 2017 and continued with Boy From Heaven(also known as Cairo Conspiracy) in 2022, was described by our reviewer as “less interested in the process of filmmaking than in the calculations behind it, and less interested in stars than in their use in propaganda.” Our critic Steve Pond points out that it is the second film at this year’s festival about the process of making a movie, after Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, and while Linklater’s film is more playful and revelatory, Saleh’s is “using cinema as a lens through which to observe one of his favorite subjects, the corruption of power and the slippery moral slope it entails.”

And maybe it’s the perfect movie for this year’s festival, with our own Sharon Waxman writing about how the festival, thus far, has seen an uneasy mixture of politics and filmmaking, perhaps best defined by the fact that “Saudi Arabia has a sprawling space on the beach in the global village where they are eagerly promoting its movie industry.” Read all of Waxman’s letter from Cannes here.